In The Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher (1870), Mr. Beecher states:                “Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows.”        
Indeed, humans have held a special appreciation for books and other written works for thousands of years, and continue to do so today. In today's information society, people have access to a vast universe of electronic works, including electronic books, articles, news stories, and countless other electronic publications containing combinations of text, charts, images, photos, etc. People also continue to access a broad variety of printed works in more traditional paper form by going to libraries, bookstores, and newsstands, or by subscribing for home or office delivery of newspapers and periodicals. As the number of sources of written works has proliferated, however, and the means for acquiring those works has increased, people have found it more and more difficult to monitor and consume all of the sources of information that interest them. For example, while it has become popular for people to create lists of hyperlinks to different web pages having information about a particular topic, using such lists requires access to an electronic device and appropriate connectivity or caching to access all of the linked-to information. While accessing information of interest with an electronic device has the advantage of allowing a user to instantly get the most up-to-date information, it can also be cumbersome at times. For example, the battery life of electronic devices can be unsuitable for trans-Atlantic flights, while the displays of electronic devices can be unsuitable when vacationing on a beach. In contrast, printed works are much more suitable for these challenging environments—but finding, purchasing, and transporting all of the printed works on a particular topic can be so challenging that most consumers won't make the effort. It would therefore be advantageous if people were able to aggregate various works of information in which they are interested, and put such works into a form that can be more readily consumed.